Council endorses HRCC visual identity project

Published on 25 October 2022

Horsham Rural City Council has adopted a plan to introduce a new visual identity for the municipality across the next two years.

Mayor Robyn Gulline said the previous logo has served the organisation well since 2008, but it was time for Council to move forward and refresh its corporate identity.

“This new brand will improve our image, give us focus and open up a new way forward in promoting our municipality as an attractive place to live, work and invest,” Cr Gulline said.

“It's about creating a new vision and key messages that we can communicate to visitors, families and industries to bring them into Horsham.

“This is more than a logo, its iconic values are aligned to the things that set the Horsham municipality apart from other regions - our geology, agriculture, waterways and soils. The design creates a meaningful and long term legacy for the organisation and the community,” she said.

Cr Gulline said the project was inspired and informed by the 2041 Community Vision project and the work of the Community Panel in 2021.

“Firstly, the Community Vision was the inspiration for the welcome sculpture recently installed near Sawyer Park. That same theme of sustainability, liveability accessibility and community will soon be represented through our renewed city entrance signage.  

“As a Councillor group we were very impressed with this work, and we requested to have the designs adopted as our municipality-wide identity,” she said.

Cr Gulline said an implementation plan was yet to be finalised and work was still to be done to have the new logo graphically produced. 

“The switch to the new visual identity will not happen overnight. But we are really excited to see this project roll out further in the coming months and into the future.”

Cr Gulline said Councillors agreed on a plan to fund the project across the next two financial years, with $287,000 to come from external Grants Commission funding in the 2022-2023 financial year and a further $500,600 allocated from the long term capital works plan to be brought forward one year to 2023-24).

A large component of this expenditure $488,000 is part of Council’s normal budget allocation relating to corporate identity and signage replacement.

“The funding of the re-branding does not impact in any way the committed budget for roads and other core services in the 2022/2023 budget,” she said.

“Flood recovery, particularly road repairs, will also be a focus of Council over the next year, and this work will be funded through Federal and State government flood recovery funding.  The allocation of Council budget to re-branding will not impact flood recovery works in any way,” Cr Gulline said.